zero_one_one

Irresponsibility is not solely the domain of Black Hats...

There's a lot of posts mentioning that a scan shouldn't cause any trouble, however there's no way of knowing how the services are configured on the other end, or how they are set up to respond to certain packet types, or how the server will respond to certain data within those packets if said data does not conform to expected lengths etc. A lot of assumptions are made that non-conforming data will be ignored in a closed proprietary system, and that the system will handle all packets across all protocols gracefully. Anyone who says sending packets to a port running an unknown service (or implementation of said service) can't cause any issues with the service is throwing quite a wide net. Running a port scan or trying to interface with any of the systems on an aircraft while it's in flight without knowing how the systems operate or interact with each other is incredibly irresponsible, if not downright stupid.

Agree with the last line 100% - although the same argument can just as easily be applied to any and all systems in any and all arenas. The fact that the potential exists leaves a margin for error, and a window for trouble, which is what the post is about. If the potential for failure in a system is there, it needs to be addressed and the effects nullified or mitigated.

Could this be a move to protect the stability of the highly lucrative Bitcoin market in China? From what I can discern from the article, this would only appear to significantly impact new cryptocurrencies and ICOs. Could it be a potentially shrewd move to maintain the state of token-based investment to that of a commodity rather than a 'futures' market (especially given the current exchange rates between existing tokens and fiat currencies)?

No arrogance nor ignorance meant from my post - if inferred, I take it back.

The last line of the comment was aiming to bring my point across (which seems to have failed) - people do not need to label themselves as anything in order to be who they are.

Please re-read my post with a little more of a light heart - the sooner we all stop defining ourselves (and others) so seriously as members of tribes old and new, the sooner we can all speak to each other on a level playing field.

I think that education can only result from prior experiences, rather than projections.

If the experience influencing education has come from those who have been 'through the ringer' at the companies pushing the technology forward, education will always be one step behind corporate influence. Catch-22 unfortunately.

The paradigm I think has shifted (for better or worse) from taking the letter from academia to taking it from those who have advanced these technologies within public perception (with or without fuelling from media influence)

If demonstrable expertise is being offered and ignored, then that's a completely different story...

I don't think it's a case of non-businesses not being listened to, more so the there are not enough representatives outside of the business stakeholders at the table putting themselves forward for representation.

There is no malice in this, although it's very easy to perceive it as so. It's purely a side product of democracy - our representatives cannot possibly (or feasibly be expected to) represent the professional or personal interests of each and every working person within their constituency without those interests being put forward ahead of time and chased - hence why the questions go out to those that are 'known to know' for advice. It's human nature - if you know someone who has experience in a domain you're unaware of, you go to them for advice. If the representative doesn't know you have this expertise, they're not going to come to you for advice.

We all take for granted that our representatives in government look out for us, however when these initiatives are raised by them, and input is requested, the questions asked are very rarely put to laymen or individuals or groups with a cursory or passing interest. They're usually put to those working in the related industry or those who have a stake in the arena, as this is where the expertise is perceived to live, and will generate the quickest consensus on the issue.

It's all down to exposure - if you are invested in an issue, find a way to get involved (reach out to you representative etc.) and have a voice in the discussions, rather than waiting idly by and demonstrating against the result.

I've been involved in standardisation within my industry for some time, and it's interesting to see how many people representing vendors are able to sway proceedings away from that which is technically neutral (and non-proprietary), to that which is financially beneficial to one or more implementers of the standardisation procedure's results.

I see the same thing in play here - the airwaves are being treated like tracts of land, and those who currently own the larger tracts don't want anyone using the smaller plots of no-man's land on their borders, in case there are accidental (or otherwise) trespasses onto 'owned territory', so to speak.

I'm not advocating one way or another (if you own something, it's yours, clean and fair), but it's interesting to see how an invisible physical space is being monetized so aggressively.

I agree with xsynonym - stay away from ICOs.

If wishes were horses... I wish I'd been born 10 years earlier and bought shares in Microsoft and Apple!

There's no way of telling what will work and what won't (and also no way of telling what will continue to work - hence the gamble in any sort of investment).

Any investment should be done with as much emotional-detachment as possible - you have to see the investment money as something that won't impact your personal life in the slightest, whether it rises or sinks.

In this case, Bitcoin is a relatively safe buy, with Ethereum as slightly less so. Monero i bleeding edge, but has great potential.

I would read up on as many of the services being offered by the cryptocurrencies (or services) you're interested in as you can, and base your investment on what you perceive to have the biggest impact to their relative industries in the future.

It's the same approach to buying penny stocks, effectively...

I don't doubt you, and I think that's an incredible shame to everything computing has enabled humanity to achieve.

This is what's good (and bad) about the cryptocurrency / blockchain (etc.) state at the moment.

It's all pure speculation, and makes a fantastic study from an anthropological and economic standpoint into how the perception of value (and the belief in that value in something) can increase the value of that 'thing'.

I think there's a lot of hyper-salesmanship at play at the moment - my real worry is that the hype catches up to the technology which is (at the base level at least), proven. When this happens, I believe a lot of these ICOs are going to crash and burn due to a lack of understanding of the base technologies they're implementing in order to generate revenue.

Abstraction is not always a good thing.

I had watched a clip from Hellraiser earlier today, and after a long day at work read the title of this post as "The Cenobite's brain..." :)

Reading the article was equally as interesting had the above been true - there has always been repetition of patterns in nature (which has certainly driven evolution) - repeated behaviour testing the state of the surrounding influences to see if and where the behaviour can influence or manipulate the state itself in order to learn and grow, and to move to testing new behavioural patterns within similarly fluid environmental states - behaviours that have grown from those proven to further the species (species propagation-related or not).

The behaviour itself may not change, but the state in which it is enacted is almost certainly never the same twice

Survival of the fittest is not necessarily down to strength and force - moreso down to species continually banging their head against a wall until they break, or indeed the wall moving in step with their behaviour(s).

Agreed - I think if they were really set on this they would release a 'pure' kernel or distribution devoid of any proprietary drivers, binaries, or non-GNU licensed code as a demonstration of how a true GNU-'compliant' distribution should look, and we can all see just how little work we can get done on it. This would by necessity exclude any and all access to non-GNU licensed code bases.

Any non-standards compliant hardware, or hardware with extended or proprietary functionality above and beyond the standards would therefore not be supported (as it appears even the offer or availability of such software takes the distribution out of contention for endorsement), meaning there would be very little work done in any realm other that the hobbyist world - giving it a rather small subset of the functionality most system users have come to expect from most *nix flavours.

Anyway - so the wheel turns...

At least GNU stands for something... :)

Along the same lines, could we start describing the value of Bitcoin breaking through a price ceiling as Surface Mounting? :)

No - Your coins are safe under the single private key (i.e. wallet) on both chains, as all transactions prior to the fork are safely recorded on the blockchain for both forks (assuming the transaction out to the paper wallet was recorded to the existing single blockchain before the fork).

Your private key can be imported from the paper wallet to a wallet for both branches of the fork, meaning you'll have two wallets with the same amount of coin on each of the two blockchains - these can be sent independently of each other to wherever you like (as each branch of the fork will ignore the transactions of the other - in theory).

The only reason to commit to one of the two would be the perceived value of one over the other, and whether you want 'double' your eggs in one basket (perceived financial value ratio of one to the other notwidthstanding).

Again, the value of both will more than likely take a hit during (and for a while after) the fork, so please don't harbour illusions about doubling your investment overnight!

There will be plenty here on HN who know more about this however, so any corrections to the above are welcome.

Transfer them out to a paper or hardware wallet at a time when transactions are still visibly being hashed at a regular rate (overly cautious advice, but who's to say 100% that the miners don't decide to down tools for a day in protest?), but I'd suggest you do this a couple of days before August 1st to avoid the transactions being clobbered in the case of a fork.

Monitor the exchanges for a couple of days (you'll now be holding the coin on both sides of the fork), and when you feel the time is right to commit to one or either side, import your keys from the paper wallet to a wallet that supports the side of the fork you like the look of the most.

Basic advice is to hold, but hold safely - in a place that you have full control of your assets.

Can you also assume absolute trust with the party you are communicating with?

Peter Norton and John Socha - Peter Norton's Assembly Language for the IBM PC.

Hideously outdated, and has practically no real world application any more, but is conversely an incredibly lucid, explanatory, and beatifully written as a guide to 16-bit Assembly language on the IBM (and compatible) PC - Guides you through first examinations of registers and memory through to creating a low-level hard disk editor.

Pop open DosBox, download MASM, and see what you can break!

Currently going for $3 on Amazon - worth a pop for that price if only for a cursory look!

https://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Language-Brady-programming-l...

I wish I had more upvotes to give this answer!

> I disagree that I'm being "idealistic" (often used as a condescending pejorative by people who want to lower standards)

A poor word choice on my part. It was certainly not meant to come across that way, so apologies there! Agreed that a cost vs risk analysis should be one of the first items on anyone's list, especially given the perceived value of the digital assets in this instance.

I'm a big fan of older programming books, and one of the favourites in my collection is Thomas Plum's 'Reliable Data Structures in C' book from way back when (1985!).

While it pre-dates ANSI C and contains a few quirks you wouldn't necessarily want in production code, I found the book to be a lucid and fantastic resource to help explain how data structures work in C, as it gives hands on applications through the building of a working piece of admin software (albeit a slightly outdated one!).

If you're aware of how pre-ANSI C differs from C89/99 et.al with regards to function and parameter declaration, it's worth buying a used copy on Amazon just to leaf through - there are copies going for a single cent (plus shipping) at the moment.

His first book 'Learning to Program in C' is also great reference to read alongside K & R (which should be mandatory reading for anyone looking to learn C, not necessarily for the code style or examples but to get a handle on the ethos of the language).

Your post is valid from a technical and idealistic standpoint, however when you realize the size of the data sets turned over in the film / TV world in a daily basis, restoring, hashing and verifying files during production schedules is akin to painting the forth bridge - only the bridge has doubled in size by the time you get half way through, and the river keeps rising...

There are lots of companies doing very well in this industry with targeted data management solutions to help alleviate these problems (I'm not sure that IT 'solutions' exist), however these backups aren't your typical database and document dumps. In today's UHD/HDR space you are looking at potentially petabytes of data for a single production - solely getting the data to tape for archive is a full time job for many in the industry, let alone administration of the systems themselves, which often need overhauling and reconfiguring between projects.

Please don't take this as me trying to detract from your post in any way - I agree with you on a great number of points, and we should all strive for ideals in day to day operations as it makes all our respective industries better. As a fairly crude analogy however, the tactician's view of the battlefield is often very different to that of the man in the trenches, and I've been on both sides of the coin. The film and TV space is incredibly dynamic, both in terms of hardware and software evolution, to the point where standardization is having a very hard time keeping up. It's this dynamism which keeps me coming back to work every day, but also contributes quite significantly to my rapidly receding hairline!